Chronic City

CHAPTER Twenty-two

Hiccup-afflicted, Perkus began to oscillate like his own eye, as though some internal compass was being again and again jostled out of its usual operation. Or perhaps it was more as if a needle was bumping on a scuffed LP, like his salvaged copy of Some Girls, and skipping from track to track. Not that Perkus had ever seemed particularly compassed-it took the onset of hiccups to make me see the relative continuity of his earlier passages. Now he reeled. He’d revive his old mode of whirlwind intertextual eurekas, citing Mailer’s The White Negro, Seymour Krim calling Lenny Bruce “the Jazz Circuit Hegel,” the expulsion of Richard Hell from Television, The Man Who Was Thursday, the aphorisms of Franz Marplot, Colin Wilson on Gurdjieff, Dennett’s theory of mind-as-computer, Borges’s “Doctor Brodie’s Report,” a Cassavetes appearance on The Gnuppet Show, all in a flurry, relying on shorthand-a glimpse of turrets in mist where once he would have drawn a whole castle in the air before me. Or he’d launch a manic exposé-something to do with Claire Carter, the mayor’s right hand and Richard Abneg’s bête noire, having a nerd-king brother who’d invented chaldrons-but run aground, mutter into his fist, begin discoursing on the progress of Ava’s bowel movements mid-sentence, or otherwise, before gaining any momentum, lose his way. If his arguments were once brakeless vehicles he could ride a mile or two before veering into a ditch-a listener climbing aboard if they dared-now they seemed compacted on arrival in one of those junkyard car-crushing machines, recognizable for their former purpose but undrivable.

Then he’d reverse himself, plunge into the newer vein, aping Ava’s doggish absolutes, renounce proliferating interpretation and context, all the cultural clues. Too much news or manufactured opinion was distraction from the deeper soundings to be conducted at a level of pure experience: Ava’s sniffing walkabouts, the corroded jape of Keith Richards’s guitar, the juicy platonic ideal of a pastrami sandwich he’d isolated at a coffee shop on York Avenue. And the weather, he was devoted to the snow and cold, the uncanny force of it, as he was to the legend of the tiger, his own personal destroyer. He preferred what defied or needed no explanation. “Alan Watts said you mustn’t concern yourself with information from outside your immediate village. People, like dogs, make demimondes for the purposes of sensory sanity. Nobody-that’s no body-really believes in the news from beyond the boundaries of their neighborhood or pocket universe. Manhattan is one of those, you know, a pocket universe.” These harangues I’d begun to think of as the Friendreth Purities, though really they’d begun earlier, with the floe-borne polar bear, whose profundity had shamed a broadside into silence. Now he published a daily War Free edition of the mind. What a dog couldn’t know wasn’t worth knowing.

Whatever the pursuit, I was his student again, reenlisted. It was as though we’d wasted time enough on misunderstandings of a personal nature. Perkus seemed in a hurry, too eager for our connection to resume his sporadic cruel needling. Apparently I gave him something Ava or Sadie Zapping couldn’t. He had their ears, but mine were more attuned to Perkus’s vocabulary, his field of reference, even if he claimed he wished to vacate that field. Biller was invisible, so far as I could tell, and Sadie treated me as an incidental presence, when we overlapped. Oona didn’t turn up in the Friendreth again. The Oonaphone was silent, or used secretly.

First, though, it had to be admitted that he had a chronic case. When I saw him the first time, two days after Oona and I had made our dawn escape, Perkus was covering his mouth, belching once or twice, or pausing in his speech, turning his head-covering, in other words, any way he could, rather than confessing the situation. At last a sonically undeniable hiccup, the world’s most onomatopoetic utterance, brazened its way from his lips while Perkus faced me directly, nowhere to hide.

“Runs in the family,” I suggested.

He glared a little warning to me not to get too cute. “Not Ava anymore.”

“Have you had them continuously?” I didn’t add, since that night.

“On and off.” He breezed a hand to dismiss the topic, but even as he did I saw him clench and swallow, stifling another.

“Trouble sleeping?”

“No,” he lied.

Her hiccups shed, Ava thrived, though it couldn’t be just my projection that she seemed more orderly, less bounding, as though the dog were every much as concerned as I was, fearing she’d somehow sap Perkus’s energies now that he’d taken her malady upon himself. Their relationship had entered another phase (I don’t know why I should find this remarkable, knowing Perkus). Ava seemed to pride herself on deferentially coiling at his feet, energies banked until Perkus made a grab for her leash or beckoned her to the dance. She’d never climb his back now, never hurl herself between his knees to trip his steps to the door. She stole less food from the table, perhaps only because she’d observed how rarely Perkus finished a meal anymore, losing interest in trying to fit in bites of egg-and-cheese or pastrami sandwiches between his grunting contractions, and how certain it was he’d push a substantial remainder her way at the end. It was as if Perkus had been training her, but when I asked he denied it, said he’d never wanted to compel her into any such Nietzschean slave-master bond. “She and I talk, Chase”-here he hiccuped, leaving a gap, which we ignored except for his wheeling eye, which seemed to search the room’s walls for the missing words-“just talk, nothing more.”

Ava also seemed a key to one of Perkus’s new motifs, a disquisition in progress on the constructed nature of all consciousness. He worked repeatedly to perfect the thought aloud, seeming to believe he and I had both been persuaded we lived in a virtual reality, and needed to feel better about it. We might as well live in a concocted environment, according to his new epiphany, since our awareness was a sort of virtual construction to begin with. No baseline reality existed to worry over. “All memories are replacements, Chase, I read about this, it’s the latest neurological breakthrough.” Why the hermetic skeptic should credit fresh scientific dispatches I didn’t know, but never mind. I obliged by asking him to explain. “Each memory is only a photocopy of the previous, rather than referring back to some stored ‘original.’ We trash the original, like some theatrical troupe that always tears up its script and bases their performance on a transcript of the night before, complete with mistakes and improvs, then destroys that script too, and so on. We have no sugar mountain to journey backward toward, Chase! Glance back and the mountain is gone. Better not to glance, and imagine you feel its weight at your back. All we’ve got is our working draft, no more final than the last, just as ready to be discarded. Memory is rehearsal for a show that never goes on!”

Fair enough, but what did this have to do with the dog? “Each day Ava traces the scent map of the real, beyond which nothing matters to her. She’s aware that the world requires reassembly each time through it. And think of what Manhattan is to a dog, Chase! If she can endure living in our daydream, we should be able to tolerate living in someone else’s!” Now that Perkus hiccuped openly before me, with evident relief he allowed the gasping intervals to open in his speeches, ellipsis made audible. The asynchronous music of his potholed speech united the Friendreth Purities with their opposite, those floodgates of paranoiac explanation that periodically opened. “Something happened, Chase, there was some rupture in this city. Since then, time’s been fragmented. Might have to do with the gray fog, that or some other disaster. Whatever the cause, ever since we’ve been living in a place that’s a replica of itself, a fragile simulacrum, full of gaps and glitches. A theme park, really! Meant to halt time’s encroachment. Of course such a thing is destined always to fail, time has a way of getting its bills paid. So these disjunctions appear, and we have to explain them away, as tigers or epic sculpture. If Noteless didn’t exist the city would have had to invent him, Chase!” The more Perkus fleshed this theory the more the holes in his speech began to seem a kind of necessary reply to the temporal lacunae he felt the city had fallen into, as well as to Laird Noteless’s bottomless pits and absent structures.

Perkus seemed to need Manhattan to be both a falsehood and in ruins (“This town is wearing tatters”) to make good on his intuitions. But Manhattan wasn’t shattered in the sense that Mick Jagger had indicated in 1978, the way Perkus needed it to be. By recent measures the city was orderly, flush with money, a little boring, even. That was, if you trusted the complacent testimony of the millions who checked TigerWatch in the morning before donning their April snowshoes and subwaying to work as usual, then in the evenings filled the bars and restaurants, or stayed home to watch The Sopranos or the Yankees, speed-dialing to stir Chinese-delivery bicyclists to flight. There was Perkus’s point, proved: the slumbering millions who never pierced or even nudged the veil of dream. I was one of them, a born sucker, but at least I was here listening to his dire facts. Was he a conspiracy theorist? He spat like I’d said rock critic. The only conspiracy was a conspiracy of distraction. The conspirers, ourselves. If I didn’t grasp this law of complicity I should go back to the beginning and start again. When he said this, I thought of Susan Eldred’s office, my first sight of his antithetical eye.

There was another dire fact Perkus wanted me to know without telling me. Something too big to be told. The sky would come crashing down if he told it, so I had to absorb it by implication. In this mysterious matter I was intended to understand Perkus had spared me the worst (I thought he’d spread pretty bad tidings already), and that this secret had to do with women generally, or with Oona Laszlo specifically, or both. Yet he wanted to dance on the precipice of telling it. One day he passingly referred to Oona as “your chaldron,” by which he meant nothing good. I found him scratching this itch again the very last day I visited him by myself. That is to say, the day before the day Richard Abneg and I finally dragged him out of the Friendreth Canine Apartments, too late.

These days Ava would come rushing to the door as I came in, plainly eager for more company but also appearing to be concerned for Perkus, wishing to scoot me in to where he sat or sometimes lay on the carpet, twitching in glee over some storage-space flotsam like the Warren Zevon LP Excitable Boy (he loved a song called “Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner”) or, in this case, the latest find, a commercial videotape he’d rescued from a pug’s quarters, a Steve Martin comedy called Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid.

“Watch-” A hiccup destroyed this word, so he began again. “Watch this with me, Chase, it’s brilliant.”

“Have you eaten?” He looked disastrous: sallow, skeletal, un-shaved, exultant. “I brought sandwiches.” I stuck to his preferences, not daring to have some variation rejected, just wanting to see nutrition go in. So pastrami, Diet Coke, pickle spears. There was no coffee brewed. He’d suddenly abandoned coffee, too.

“It’s not sitting well.”

“What’s not?”

“Food.” Unspoken, but heard, was You idiot!

The black-and-white Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was a satirical film noir, and a curious amalgam of twelfth-grade tit jokes and an elaborate intertextual trick: Steve Martin’s character, a stooge of a private eye, is allowed by the magic of editing to interact with a number of dead performers from ancient movies, Barbara Stanwyck, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, and so on. The element, practically an avant-garde gesture, was fascinating and stillborn, destroying any possible mood or rhythm. But incredibly to me, Perkus had located in Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid another sacred item. I guess Perkus identified with Martin’s detective, for the way he breezed in and out of the archival footage, reanimating his own pantheon of heroes. This was analogous to how Perkus saw himself moving amid Brando, Groom, Krim, Cassavetes, Mailer, Marplot, Serling, and all the others.

Or so I was thinking, as I sat trying to grasp Perkus’s intensity yet again. It was then we came to what it turned out he regarded as the key scene. Steve Martin, whose relations with the femme fatale are absurdly abusive and overwrought, opens the cabinet behind his bathroom mirror and finds a note he’s taped there, intended to remind him on a daily basis of something he needs to know: “Guns Don’t Kill Detectives, Love Does.” Perkus spoke these words aloud as they appeared on the screen, forcing himself past the urge to hiccup at the cost of a wrenching shudder. “Guns! Don’t! Kill! Detectives! Love! Does! You see that, Chase?”

“Funny.”

“What’s funny about it?” Perkus’s voice was sharp. He was suddenly spoiling for trouble, an interpretive high noon. Ava got up on all threes and pointed her nose to the door, to meet whatever invader his tone signaled.

I tried, as ever, to meet his standard. “Well, I guess it distills Raymond Chandler’s lifework to a bumper sticker…” I’d personally always thought the hard-boiled mode wearisome to begin with, so its sending-up felt pretty fish-in-a-barrel.

“Sure, it does that, you’re right. But that’s not what kills me about this scene.”

What kills you? I wanted to scream. What kills me is how you smell as if you haven’t showered any more recently than your pit bull friend, how your former impeccable suits have degenerated into the same New York Cosmos sweatshirt worn for weeks on end, how your haircut and speech and self-awareness have all gone as crooked as your eye, how your long intellectual voyaging has culminated in a Steve Martin flick. I wasn’t going to be swayed into this latest and least of epiphanies, I swore. The closer I looked the more I felt I’d been overlooking the obvious, my eye trained too incrementally on Perkus’s details to survey the whole grim trend. He was falling apart, falling down. I couldn’t believe I’d let him fall so far. Or that other eyewitnesses, guilty bystanders, hadn’t stepped in-I blamed them for what I hadn’t seen myself.

“Have you showed this film to Sadie Zapping?” I asked, craftily, I thought.

“Sadie quit coming around,” he said. His hand flipped up to flag contempt. “She kept wanting me to try these stupid cures. I swallowed so much water I bloated like a tick. What I love about this scene, Chase, isn’t simply that Martin’s epigraph cuts so deep into the heart of the matter, but that having arrived at such an essential admonition, he actually forgets it and needs to be reminded each day at his shaving mirror!”

I was glad I hadn’t suggested any of my own stupid cures. “What about Biller?”

“So, the point is how we forget the most basic fact of ourselves on a daily basis, even while we go around playing our parts, believing ourselves perfectly continuous. Yet a thing can be blotted from the very center of our vision and we won’t notice! Even the very thing we should most remember! It’s like when I tried to write a book, Chase. Practically every day I had to remind myself what it was even about, why I’d even started it! What do you mean, what about Biller?” Perkus’s gaps just kept on getting more frequent, and longer.

“I just wondered if he still comes around.”

“Biller’s busy making treasure.”

“Oh, sure, I forgot.” I’d also forgotten, if he’d actually mentioned it, that Perkus had ever tried to write a book. But no, he hadn’t mentioned it. That I would have remembered. It seemed such a simple and humble confession, and I was embarrassed for him for an instant, for burying the lede, slipping the fact into an aside. Then I returned to more root, more animal, worries. No Biller, no Zapping, Laszlo not since the misbegotten night, Abneg never seen in this vicinity, occupied entirely now with his pregnant girlfriend-I, Insteadman, was alone in charge of the faltering organism before me.

“Guns don’t kill detectives. Love does!” The film had progressed beyond that moment, but Perkus hadn’t. He barked the line, seemingly at Ava, as if this were his new song, one he thought as compelling as a Rolling Stones riff, and they should jump up and dance. They didn’t jump up and dance. Perkus remained where he sat cross-legged on the floor, too close to the television, I thought, poised with his hand on the remote, his knobby spine showing where his sweatshirt rode to part from his threadbare corduroys. Ava, in a posture of readiness, had split the difference between us and the door, not wanting to miss a beat when the situation clarified. She cocked her head at Perkus with what seemed tender sympathy, but might only have been a yen for him to break into the ignored sandwiches.

“What does it mean to you, Perkus?” I asked gently. “I never thought of love as your big nemesis.”

“No, true enough, I’ve largely skirted that stuff. Skirted-ha! No, Steve Martin more reminds me of you, Chase. Oh, shit.”

“Did Ava-?” I started this question and stopped, for I’d craned to see that the dog remained poised where she’d been a moment before, the kitchen tile surrounding her clean on all sides, the scent deriving elsewhere.

“Excuse me,” said Perkus, swallowing the words. He pulled himself upright using the back of a chair for a ladder. He’d paused the film, an inadvertent screen-capture of Martin’s foolish, cross-eyed scowl frosted in a blizzard of static, and now turned his head from my view, to face the heavily draped window, around the edges of which blazing light leaked, the sky smashing its whiteness against the city. A major storm had been predicted to tumble in before nightfall, though I had no way of being certain Perkus, devoid of newspapers or neighborly gossip, knew this vindicating fact. All of us, Steve Martin, Ava, Perkus, myself, had revealed in the same instant our pensive side, a moment of collective interspecies ellipsis that would have solemnized the occasion if it could have been solemnized. It couldn’t. Perkus hiccuped silently-I knew well enough by now when he’d hushed one. There was nothing to lose at this point, tensing against the spasm with the muscles of his gut, which had just untensed more than he’d intended. The smell expanded like a parachute, covering the apartment’s prevailing dull canine perfume.

“What happened?” I said, though the question was needless. I knew what had happened.

“I crapped myself,” said Perkus.